Acies is a multinational firm comprising businesses that focus on providing advisory and implementation services, technology applications and platforms, content and learning and development solutions, and strategic investments. The firm is headquartered in India and has global offices and entities based in APAC (Singapore and Malaysia), the Middle East and Africa (Mauritius), and the Americas (USA) respectively. The firm started its journey from Mumbai in the year 2017, and since then has been expanding globally and has executed over 150 engagements across nine countries for over 70 financial services and corporate clients.
Acies has also been awarded by Regulation Asia for a pioneering project in regulatory data management.
Mr. Muzammil Patel, Global Head Strategy and Corporate Finance at Acies is the Global Head of Strategy and Corporate Finance at Acies. Where he is responsible for driving Acies’ strategy for the firm and its businesses and working with the Acies global and regional leaders to enhance the Acies global footprint. He also heads the Consulting business at Acies where he works closely with leading financial institutions and corporate clients, providing advisory and technology solutions to deliver transformation programs that address their regulatory and business challenges.
Over his career, Muzammil has worked with regulators and industry bodies as an advisor to help formulate the supervisory framework for high-priority areas in the risk management space, such as liquidity risk, intraday liquidity, and commodity price risk management. He has also authored several articles and thought leadership in the treasury, commodity hedging, and financial risk management space.
In his previous roles, Muzammil has worked with Deloitte as a Partner and EY as an Associate Director. Muzammil holds a Masters of Commerce from the University of Mumbai, is a qualified Chartered Accountant and is certified in Financial Risk Management by the Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP), USA.
- What are the primary elements driving India’s demand for No Code services?
India’s demand for no-code platforms and services is driven primarily by the scarcity of talented coders and solution architects. To add to this, delayed bespoke implementation projects, rapidly changing business needs, and cost consciousness in relation to increasing technology spending have all contributed to the rapid move toward no-code platforms. The shift towards no-code platforms has especially helped in accelerating digitization in customer and employee engagement-related use cases.
- How do you feel? Can the No Code platform set new standards in fields where coding was the only available option?
No-code platforms will most certainly be the new standard in application development. Continuing to code instead of using no-code platforms is both an expensive and inefficient proposition. We expect all bespoke development will move to no-code platforms in the next couple of years. I also expect vendor platforms and specialized software to either start getting built on no-code platforms or getting replaced by custom development on no-code platforms over the next five years.
- What is the future of the No Code platform precisely in India vis-à-vis the global scenario? And how large is the opportunity in India?
India is likely to keep pace with global adoption and will most likely adopt no-code faster than the rest of the world. India has a large talent pool of business analysts and domain specialists who are getting re-skilled to build on no-code platforms. India also has a large skillset pool of bespoke developers who are seeking to get re-skilled on no-code development. The opportunity for India to serve its own digital agenda as well as the global need for digitalization is massive especially with no-code platforms. We would expect that India would have at least 2-3 no-code platform providers operating at a global scale. We also expect that about 20% of all software development related exports from India will be on no-code platforms in the next two years.
- How did your firm do over the past two years given that the pandemic era had a detrimental influence on all businesses?
In the past 2 years, we have focused heavily on strengthening our no-code platform: Revolutio. We have focused on increasing the possible use cases and making the platform more and more user friendly. The pandemic provided us an opportunity to re-think strategy, re-focus our investments on long-term IP and propagate new innovations to our clients. While the pandemic challenged old business models especially those dependent or supported by people mobility, it also allowed us to increase our technology footprint across the Financial Services industry.
We measure our success and growth through a metric called embedded value i.e. current year revenue and revenue contracted over multi-year contracts. We have seen our EV almost triple over the last two years.
- Can you share the target of your revenue generation in the upcoming fiscal year?
Our target for year-on-year revenue increase is approximately 40% and we expect it to stay this way for the next 3 years. To ensure that we are engaging with customers for longer-term value and longer-term earnings for us as well, we focus on embedded value as a key metric over current year revenue. We expect our EV to roughly triple every year for the next 3 years.
